“Regardless of cultural influences, what turns the brain on is still predominantly, though not exclusively, personal: sensory pleasure, love, family, friendship, wealth, material possessions, security, social status, emotional expression, art, sport, spirituality, and so on. And in order for us to experience all these things, we must first survive and reproduce; hence, two of our […]
“With reflective consciousness, a human being can turn itself into a ‘mirror neuron’ for the universe, because humanity is the only thing on Earth that tries to understand what it is all about. I hasten to add that this is still largely a potential; what has emerged so far is a pretty reluctant mirror neuron. […]
“‘However hard I try to be nice I always end up with my nose in the dirt and my thumb feeling for somebody’s eye.’” ––The Lady in the Lake, by Raymond Chandler, pg. 137
“‘I don’t figure Bill meant to kill her,’ he said sadly. ‘He could choke a girl to death without meaning to at all. He has mighty strong hands. Once done he has to use what brains God gave him to cover up what he done. I feel real bad about it, but that don’t alter […]
“‘I may have to come back,’ I said. ‘But it won’t be just to swop gags. It will be because I find something out that needs talking over.’ ‘So you think I’m lying,’ he said savagely. ‘I think you have something on your mind. I’ve looked at too many faces not to know. It may […]
“We have reached a threshold: modernity and science seem to be putting the human species in danger, but at the same time they are offering the unprecedented, seemingly incredible promise of a quantum leap in the human condition. As we stand at the posthuman frontier, should we retreat by actively curtailing further progress, or instead […]
“Thought is matter as much as the floor, the wall, the telephone, are matter. Energy functioning in a pattern becomes matter. There is energy and there is matter. That is all life is. We may think thought is not matter but it is. Thought is matter as an ideology.” ––Freedom from the Known, by Jiddu […]
“What should I be doing? She took her medications, slept for six to seven hours a night, and clung to the normalcy of day-to-day life at Harvard. She felt like a fraud, posing as a Harvard professor without a progressive neurodegenerative disease, working every day as if everything were just fine and would continue that […]
“The moment you protect your family, your country, a bit of coloured rag called a flag, a belief, an idea, a dogma, the thing that you demand or that you hold, that very protection indicates anger. So can you look at anger without any explanation or justification, without saying, ‘I must protect my goods’, or […]
“‘The more we “communicate” the way we do, the more we create a hellish world,’ wrote Parisian philosopher––also a historian of cybernetics––Jean-Pierre Dupuy. I take ‘hell’ in its theological sense, i.e., a place which is void of grace––the undeserved, unnecessary, surprising, unforeseen. A paradox is at work here: ours is a world about which we […]